Dracula's Guest And Other Weird Tales Read Online Free PDF

effectively becomes in her ophidian form is the physical representation of her departure from received and acceptable womanhood.
    The physical borderland that Lady Arabella March embodies, between human and animal, and male and female, is similarly reflected in her very name, which also makes a connection with the historical feminine. The name ‘Mercia’ itself means ‘the land of the boundary people’, from the Anglo-Saxon word
Mierce
for boundary, whilst the heart of the kingdom of Mercia once covered that area which is now known as the Welsh Marches. Stoker may have also drawn inspiration for his fictional dominatrix from the historical chronicles of Mercia’s own commanding female, Queen Æthelflaed. Æthelflaed’s reign (911–18) was unique not only because she stood almost alone in early medieval Europe as a female ruler in her own right, or because she was a woman in command of a kingdom dominated by warfare and the needs of warfare, but because her reign was remarkably successful personally, politically and militarily. Mercia prospered under her guidance, successfully defending itself against outside aggression, but also securing a series of victorious military campaigns against theWelsh and the Danes. 28 Clearly a strong character able to wield power and command respect, Æthelflaed, like Queen Elizabeth I, stepped outside the gender expectations of later historians and chroniclers.
    Despite accusations of a hasty pen or an unwieldy imagination, then, the rationality of Stoker’s mind in creating
The Lair of the White Worm
cannot be questioned. His knowledge and consideration of historical and thematic material and the story’s measured construction within a
fin de siècle
framework of fear of the dominant female reveal an imagination thoroughly in tune with the cultural zeitgeist. Moreover, and as the next section will show, the composition of
The Lair of the White Worm
displays an originality which places the novel at the vanguard of early twentieth-century literary expression.
Twin Pillars of Wisdom: Art and Science
    The 1911 edition of
The Lair of the White Worm
included six colour plates by the artist and clairvoyant Pamela Coleman Smith. Illustrating scenes from the novel, the pictures variously depicted: Edgar Caswall mesmerizing Lilla, Caswall’s hawk-shaped red kite, Oolanga with an armful of snakes, and Lady Arabella dancing in the wood, descending the turret steps of Castra Regis, and as the White Worm. By virtue of the difficulty of their reproduction, however, these images have been left out of subsequent reprints. This is unfortunate as they draw attention to Stoker’s preoccupation with the visual as well as the textual narrative. Coleman Smith had accompanied the Lyceum Theatre Company on its sixth tour of America in 1899 and is probably now best remembered for her illustrations of the classic Rider-Waite tarot deck. The strikingly bold use of block colour combined with an almost cartoon-like simplicity of line and structure that characterizes Coleman Smith’s illustrations (as well as her tarot designs) elevates Stoker’s narrative beyond formal, definable realism. Indeed, in the hallucinatory game with reality that the novel itself engages in, in its destabilization of rationality and even in the very pace at which it was written,
The Lair of the White Worm
itself displays artisticelements that would be at the heart of the Surrealist movement that emerged six years after its publication.
    Surrealism itself was inspired in part by the English Gothic novel’s philosophy of immediacy, non-rational emotional excess and exploitation of subconscious desires and fears. The hyperbolic immoderation of novels such as Horace Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto
and Matthew Lewis’s
The Monk
(1796) particularly appealed to the Surrealists in their rebellion against propriety and convention, typified in much of the movement’s painting by the deliberate displacement of external object for internal